in the shell

Sooner or later, I feel like checking out the two Evangelion movies, "Death & Rebirth" and "The End of Evangelion." Do any of you here know if I need to watch any episodes of the TV series in order to understand the two movies?

Yeah, the movies would probably make a lot more sense if you watched the series first. Especially since the connections Death and Rebirth makes between certain scenes from the series would be confusing if you didn't know the original context, and End of Evangelion is a reworking of the show's ending...

I liked the Evangelion series as a whole but I didn't care much for the original episodes 25 and 26 to me they were episodes that people would find boring. As for End of Evangelion, I liked the first part of it with the assault on Nerv headquarters but the second part was confusing, all of the live action scenes, in my opinion, live action scenes of people walking down a street in a city does not work in an anime series and all of the still images that looks like someone has drawn them on paper didn't go well with me. Plus the ending was confusing.

It seemed like that the second part of End of Evangelion was concerned about the meaning behind symbols.

I've been wondering the same thing, how many episodes are there in the series? i don't think I can take too much of it. might just watch the movie and be happily confused..

There are 26 episodes in the Neon Genesis Evangelion series.